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1 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found by: [Portland State University]Date: 02 October 2017, At: 10:29 Third World QuarterlyISSN: 0143-6597 (Print) 1360-2241 (Online) Journal homepage: case for colonialismBruce GilleyTo cite this article: Bruce Gilley (2017): The case for colonialism, Third World Quarterly, link to this article: online: 08 Sep your article to this Journal Article views: 15489 View related articles View Crossmark dataThird World QuarTerly, 2017 case for colonialismBruce Gilleydepartment of Political Science, Portland State university, Portland, or, uSaABSTRACTFor the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. It is high time to question this orthodoxy. Western colonialism was, as a general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found, using realistic measures of those concepts. The countries that embraced their colonial inheritance, by and large, did better than those that spurned it.

2 Anti-colonial ideology imposed grave harms on subject peoples and continues to thwart sustained development and a fruitful encounter with modernity in many places. Colonialism can be recovered by weak and fragile states today in three ways: by reclaiming colonial modes of governance; by recolonising some areas; and by creating new Western colonies from the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. Colonialism has virtually disappeared from international affairs, and there is no easier way to discredit a political idea or opponent than to raise the cry of colonialism . When South African opposition politician Helen Zille tweeted in 2017 that Singapore s success was in part attributable to its ability to build on valuable aspects of colonial heritage , she was vilified by the press, disciplined by her party, and put under investigation by the country s human rights is high time to reevaluate this pejorative meaning.

3 The notion that colonialism is always and everywhere a bad thing needs to be rethought in light of the grave human toll of a century of anti-colonial regimes and policies. The case for Western colonialism is about rethinking the past as well as improving the future. It involves reaffirming the primacy of human lives, universal values, and shared responsibilities the civilising mission without scare quotes that led to improvements in living conditions for most Third World peoples during most episodes of Western colonialism. It also involves learning how to unlock those benefits again. Western and non-Western countries should reclaim the colonial toolkit and language as part of their commitment to effective governance and international are three ways to reclaim colonialism. One is for governments and peoples in devel-oping countries to replicate as far as possible the colonial governance of their pasts as successful countries like Singapore, Belize and Botswana did.

4 The good governance agenda, which contains too many assumptions about the self-governing capacity of poor countries, 2017 Southseries inc., and colonisation capacity-building humanitarian interventions fragile states governanceARTICLE HISTORY received 24 april 2017 accepted 15 august 2017 CONTACT Bruce Gilley by [Portland State University] at 10:29 02 October 2017 2 B. GILLEY should be replaced with the colonial governance agenda. A second way is to recolonise some areas. Western countries should be encouraged to hold power in specific governance areas (public finances, say, or criminal justice) in order to jump-start enduring reforms in weak states. Rather than speak in euphemisms about shared sovereignty or neo-trusteeship , such actions should be called colonialism because it would embrace rather than evade the historical record. Thirdly, in some instances it may be possible to build new Western colonies from can return (either as a governance style or as an extension of Western author-ity) only with the consent of the colonised.

5 Yet now that the nationalist generation that forced sudden decolonisation on hapless populations has passed away, the time may be ripe. S be has documented how the founding figures of Western colonialism in Africa (such as Livingstone in Zambia, Lugard in Nigeria and de Brazza in Congo) are enjoying a resur-gence of official and social respect in those countries now that romanticised pre-colonial and disappointing postcolonial approaches to governance have lost their As one young man on the streets of Kinshasa asked Van Reybrouck (as described in his seminal 2010 book on the Congo): How long is this independence of ours going to last anyway? When are the Belgians coming back? 2 Three failures of anti-colonial critiqueThe case for the past record of Western colonialism usually referring to British, French, German, Belgian, Dutch and Portuguese colonies from the early nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries rests on overturning two distinct lines of criticism: that it was objectively harmful (rather than beneficial); and that it was subjectively illegitimate (rather than legitimate).

6 There is, in addition, a third line of criticism that merits revision: that it offends the sensibilities of contemporary objective costs/benefits approach identifies a certain need of human flourishing development, security, governance, rights, etc. and asks whether colonialism improved or worsened the objective provision of that need. One main challenge of this research is to properly enumerate the things that matter and then to assign them weights, weights that presumably varied with time and place. In a brutally patriarchal society, for instance, access to justice for women may have been more important than the protection of indigenous land rights (which may be part of that patriarchy), as Andreski argued was the case for women in northern Nigeria under second challenge is measuring the counterfactual: what would likely have happened in a given place absent colonial rule?

7 Many research designs, for instance, control for varia-tions in colonial rule itself and for a variety of other factors that co-existed with colonialism (such as cultural norms, geography, population, disease burden, etc.) But they do not control for the presence or absence of colonialism, for instance a highly cited study by Acemoglu and To construct such a counterfactual requires measuring not just global social, economic and technological trends but also the likely course of indigenous development, of regional factors and of an ungoverned non-colonial encounter with the West. Countries that did not have a significant colonial history China, Ethiopia, Liberia, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Haiti and Guatemala, for instance provide a measure of comparison to help iden-tify what if anything were the distinctive effects of colonialism. So too does research into pre-colonial histories that, almost by definition, reveal comparatively weak institutions, Downloaded by [Portland State University] at 10:29 02 October 2017 THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY 3divided societies and subsistence economies, for instance in Biber s study of pre-colonial some of these complexities, Abernethy summarises the objective costs/benefits question as follows: [I]n times and places where colonial rule had, on balance, a positive effect on training for self-gov-ernment, material well-being, labor allocation choices, individual upward mobility, cross-cultural communication, and human dignity, compared to the situation that would likely have obtained absent European rule, then the case for colonialism is strong.

8 Conversely, in times and places where the effects of foreign rule in these respects were, on balance, negative compared to a territory s likely alternative past, then colonialism is morally these requirements, there is a list of simple epistemic virtues. Non-biased data and case selection, for instance, requires that evidence be gathered in a way that does not confirm the hypothesis at stake. So any claim about, say, the level of colonial violence requires not just assumptions about the scale of violence that would have occurred absent colonial rule but also a careful measure of that violence relative to the population, security threat and security resources in a given territory. One is hard-pressed, to take a prominent example, to find a single example of such care in measurement in the vast critical scholarship on the British counter-insurgency campaign against the Mau in Kenya from 1952 to 1960, especially the scolding work of Daniels argues that [h]ad the British left Kenya to the Mau, there would have been anarchy and further civil war, perhaps even genocide.

9 8 Just as many Kenyans joined the Kikuyu Home Guard and the special prison service for the rebels as joined the insurgency, and the independent Kenyan government long applauded the historic con-tribution of the British in suppressing the At the very least, it is incumbent on scholars to show that the brutalities unleashed by the British in this campaign were not the likely result of a proportionate response given the context and scale of the threat. If this supposedly solid case is wobbly, what does it tell us about the lesser violence often cited as invalidating colonialism?Perhaps the most egregious violation of epistemic virtues is internal coherence (or non-contradiction). Eminent scholars repeatedly make the logically contradictory claim that colonialism was both too disruptive and not disruptive enough, whether with regard to boundaries, governing institutions, economic systems or social structures, as evidenced in the short space of just two pages by Africanists in particular applaud the work both of Herbst,11 who argued that colonialism did too little state-making, and Young,12 who earlier argued that it did too much.

10 New territorial boundaries are criticised for forcing social inte-gration while old ones are criticised for reinforcing tribalism, a contradiction noted by Marxist scholars found colonialism at fault when it did not invest in public health and infrastructure (showing a callous disregard for labour) and when it did (in order to exploit it).14 Colonialism is credited with near-magical powers to sweep away everything good in its path (like tribal chiefs or ethnic identity) and with equally magical powers to make per-manent everything bad in its path (like tribal chiefs or ethnic identity).Finally, there is the simple epistemic virtue of falsification. This is most pointed in the treatment of what was undoubtedly a benefit of colonialism: the abolition of slave-trading. Anti-colonial critics squirm and fidget over this issue because it puts the greatest strain on their colonialism bad perspective.